Files generated in compliance with the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) standard JESD3-C are used for programming field programmable logic devices. The JESD3-C standard defines a format for transferring fuse or cell states between a development system and a programmer. The files consist of (i) non-programming fields within a design specification portion, (ii) device programming fields, and (iii) a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) portion.
Programming a device starts with presenting parameters defining a program to the development system along with non-programming type information. The development system generates programming items from the parameters. The programming items are then stored in the programmable fields of the file. The non-programmable type information is stored in the non-programming fields of the file.
The JESD3-C standard has several practical limitations. One limitation is that the files cannot be used to reverse calculate the original parameters. A common practice is to dispose of the original device programming parameters once the file has been verified as correct and the programmed devices have gone into production. Consequently, the original intent of the program is lost with the discarding of the parameters. Another limitation is that a corrupted file cannot be repaired.